Now perhaps I ought not to give away my bias, but I am one such devotee of the standing desk, and in preparation for (my last) fall semester, I decided that I would provide myself with a workspace of suitable height. Thanks to a google search and much to my luck, Ikea sells just the thing. The line, although bestowed with the funny title Utby, and categorized suspiciously as a “bar table,” fit my needs perfectly.

Having spent a good portion of my afternoon putting it together, I am quite pleased with the results. Without adjustment, the desk stands at about the perfect height for someone six feet tall, and is adjustable by about three inches upwards. Despite my frustration with several aspects of the Utby’s construction (I’ve never heard of an Ikea piece that required wood-screws), my first impressions would highly recommend it.

So if, perhaps, you are one of those sad fellows setting his laptop upon a cardboard box –give this desk a try.

As this blog serves a largely technical purpose, I ought to mention my use of latex (specifically, LaTeXIT) for all of November’s writings. This decision was mostly to my benefit — the pdf files produced look wonderful, and the memoir package made chapter organization easy — but it also beget a few annoyances. For instance, getting decent word count updates was rather non-trivial, and the NaNoWriMo site does not accept pdf or tex files for verification. Ultimately, however, my experience was a positive one, and I would recommend latex to future participants.

In any case, I can assure the nonexistent reader that this blog should become more active in future days and weeks.

Strangely, after being overwhelmed with spam (and possibly some XSS) my former blog skyrocketed in google’s search results. There’s something wrong with that…